Can You Avoid Paying Income Tax?

Elon Musk is depressed from overwork, just like many American his age. This is why your life goal should be to strive for full financial freedom by creating enough income streams such that your needs are fully met without you having to devote your time to it.

If you’ve read my book, you’ll know that I’ve identified being a digital nomad operating your own online business as one of the best ways to achieve that end. While I was pondering this, I wondered if there was a loophole in the system, a backdoor lifehack to circumvent existing laws regarding residence, territoriality, and taxation. That is, can you avoid paying all income tax completely?

As it turns out, others have wondered the same thing. Basically, most countries will not tax you if you haven’t lived in that country for a certain amount of time to qualify for residence. Usually it’s something close to less than half of the calendar year. By staying below that level, you avoid being considered a tax resident of that country. The US is a little different, being one of only two countries (along with Eritrea) to tax you on worldwide income regardless of residence, though it does give a foreign earned income exclusion.

The loophole is due to laws regarding residence and taxation that have not yet caught up with modern innovations in travel, communication, and technology. Before with income tied to jobs which were tied to location, countries can get their share of tax from your employer or from you based on your residence (if you operated a small business, for instance). However, now we have online web businesses that we can run from anywhere in the world. If governments can’t tax us at the source of production (because the business is “based” in a tax haven) or by residence (due to the digital nomad being constantly on the roam, never staying long enough in any country to gain residence), we’re free from all income tax.

As an example, let’s take a British citizen who wants to start a web business offering cultural sensitivity consulting to large established companies. This adventurous individual incorporates in Bermuda or the Cayman Islands, and then proceeds to travel the world, never staying long enough in any single place to owe taxes. This is made easy with visa free access to many of the world’s most fun destinations, and eventually our nomad settles on a regular cycle of Ireland -> Thailand -> Singapore -> Australia -> Panama -> Ireland. Meanwhile, all the web income generated from work done remotely is not subject to tax in any of the countries visited, since the corporate income is categorized as earned in the tax haven.

Let’s celebrate this with a Joan Baez song glorifying the joy of avoiding taxes: